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Introduction: After Postmodernism m Introduction: After Postmodernism Andrew Hoberek T h e essays in this issue o f Twentieth-Century Literature propose new models for understanding contemporary fiction in the wake of postmod­ ernism’s waning influence. By now, as Jeremy Green notes, declarations of postmodernism’s demise have become a critical commonplace (19-24). The intellectual historian Minsoo Kang provides a usefully succinct ex­ ample, dating “the death knell of postmodernism in the US” on “June 18, 1993,” the date that the John McTiernan-directed Arnold Schwarzeneg­ ger vehicle The Last Action Hero brought “the standard [postmodern] devices of self-reference, ironic satire, and playing with multiple levels of reality” to the multiplex.“[I]n the US,” Kang wryly notes,“there’s no surer sign of an intellectual idea’s final demise than its total appropriation by mass culture.” In this formulation, postmodernism was done in by its own success. Postmodern writers had enjoyed a notorious and wild ride of radical challenge to institutionalized art and its generic categories in the 1970s and 1980s, but their ironic, skeptical, and knowing (yet celebratory) juxtapositions of high and low, and their rejection of objective (or politi­ cal) reality as a significant object or limit for representation, no longer worked by the 1990s. Mass culture itself had appropriated the aesthetics of postmodernism, which—now playing monotonously on everyone’s television and computer screens—turned out to be as reproducible as its creators had contemptuously said all previous art was. At least that’s one way to tell the story. But while there are good rea­ sons, as the contributors to this issue show, for arguing that contemporary fiction is no longer adequately described as postmodern, this particular narrative of postmodernism’s decline has three interrelated problems. First and perhaps most obviously, it perpetuates a hierarchical view of culture that confuses aesthetic questions about literary form with sociological Twentieth-Century Literature 53.3 Fall 2007 233 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/twentieth-century-lit/article-pdf/53/3/233/476051/0530233.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 Andrew Hoberek ones about the constituencies for such form. This tendency to locate postmodernism’s decline not in the waning of its forms but in their suc­ cessful cultural diffusion points to a second problem with this narrative: its reproduction of the characteristically modernist investment—by and large carried over into high postmodernism—in difficult formal innova­ tion as the defining characteristic of serious literature (Steiner 427-28). This is not to condemn formally challenging fiction in the name of some transparent realism, as Tom Wolfe, Dale Peck, and Jonathan Franzen have done,1 but rather to criticize the elision of a certain modernist brand of self-conscious technical innovation with literary form in general. Wolfe, Peck, and Franzen ironically reproduce this elision in their own under­ standing of realism as opposed to, rather than a product of, authors’ formal choices. Moreover, as I will suggest below, their polemics—while interest­ ing as a symptom of postmodernism’s waning influence— also participate in the inherently progressive and conflictual understanding of literary history that is the third problem with our story of postmodernism’s de­ cline. Although these authors champion a premodernist realism, that is, they evince a modernist understanding of literary change as grounded in periods of sweeping innovation that set aside their now-outmoded prede­ cessors. While this model o f literary history has been carried over into and codified in postmodernism, it in fact obscures the messy circumstances of postmodernism’s own emergence and the parallels between this process and the contemporary state of fiction. Kang, for instance, sees the current post-postmodern period of be­ calmed anticipation or “lull” as radically different from earlier periods of Western intellectual history characterized by intense conflict between dominant and emergent paradigms. But this assessment, while having some purchase in the field of cultural theory that spurs Kang’s remarks, mischaracterizes the history of post—World War II American fiction. The current state of such fiction—-in which postmodernism in the strong sense constitutes just one, no longer particularly privileged stylistic op­ tion among many—in fact resembles nothing so much as the state that followed the triumphant years of modernism. While American fiction after 1945 had clearly departed from the modernist path (unlike paint­ ing, where abstract expressionism constituted an Americanized extension of the modernist revolution), neither did it offer a clear alternative to modernism. As the essays that Marcus Klein collects in his 1969 volume The American Novel Since World War II suggest, critics in this period were 234 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/twentieth-century-lit/article-pdf/53/3/233/476051/0530233.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 Introduction: After Postmodernism acutely concerned with the waning of modernism, which like postmod­ ernism today had become institutionalized and routinized (albeit not in mass culture but in the still pardy autonomous realm of the university). But these critics had not yet distinguished postmodernism from compet­ ing styles or identified it as the dominant mode of serious fiction. It is true, for instance, that Irving Howe uses the scare-quoted term “post­ modern” in the 1959 essay included in Klein’s collection (137). But for Howe the postmodern remains a temporal rather than a formal category: he defines it with reference to an external condition (the rise of “mass society” [130] and the disappearance o f the “fixed social categories” [137] upon which modernism battened), and he includes in his account authors (Bernard Malamud, J. D. Salinger, Saul Bellow) whose work we would now no longer consider postmodern. It is only toward the end of Klein’s anthology, and the period that it covers, that something like what we consider to be postmodernism comes into view, albeit under other names such as black humor (Feldman). And even the final essay in the volume, John Barth’s 1967 “The Literature of Exhaustion,” has— despite its status as a postmodern manifesto—more to say about Jorge Luis Borges than any of Barth’s contemporaries. Perhaps most tellingly, Thomas Pynchon gets only three entries in Klein’s index, compared to Bellow’s 28. Similarly, Tony Tanner’s classic 1971 study o f contemporary American fiction City of Words gives authors like Pynchon and William Burroughs more or less equal space alongside such fifties stalwarts as Bellow, Malamud, and Ralph Ellison (although Tanner includes a speculative conclusion citing William Gaddis, Donald Barthelme, and Richard Brautigan as examples of “how American fiction has moved, and is moving” [393]). Like the narrative cinema that established itself over its rivals in the early twentieth century, though, postmodernism subsequently achieved a level of cultural hegemony that conferred upon it a retrospective inevi­ tability. Beginning with Leslie Fiedler’s and Ihab Hassan’s early efforts to devise, in Fiedler’s 1970 words, “a Post-Modernist criticism appropriate to Post-Modernist fiction and verse” (271), postmodernism was rapidly institutionalized in journals like Boundary 2 and in important studies by Brian McHale, Linda Hutcheon, Fredric Jameson, and others.2 This is not to suggest that postmodernism was merely a critical fiction. Authors like Barth, Burroughs, and Gaddis were clearly producing recognizably postmodern texts in the 1950s, and postmodernism’s prominence in the 1970s and 1980s was visible not only in syllabuses and academic jour­ 235 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/twentieth-century-lit/article-pdf/53/3/233/476051/0530233.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 Andrew Hoberek nals but also, for instance, in the postmodern turn taken by a decidedly nonacademic author like Philip Roth. Even at its high point, however, postmodernism—and in particular the form of postmodernism defined around self-conscious literary experimentalism— was not the only or even always the dominant player on the literary field. In 1974, a year after the publication of Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, the original incarnation of the group that now calls itself Fiction Collective Two was founded to provide a venue for authors whose stylistic complexity even then made it hard for them to find commercial publishers.3 And Wendy Steiner has argued that this period in American literary history is in fact best understood not as purely postmodern but as characterized by the coexistence and frequent commingling of high postmodernist experimentalism, traditional realism, and an autobiographical strain related to both women’s writing and the memoir (528—29, passim).4 By this point, I might seem to have undercut this issue’s premise by invalidating any basis for distinguishing between contemporary fiction and that of the so-called postmodern period. For one thing, postmodern techniques—even if they no longer play quite the dominant role they once did— have hardly disappeared from contemporary fiction. Green makes a strong case for their ongoing relevance, which is also visible in the continued prominence of authors like Pynchon and DeLillo and the work of younger figures like David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, and the writers associated with McSweeney’s. Indeed, despite Franzen’s antipostmodern polemics, his own writing continues to partake of a De- Lilloesque “language of smart commentary” (Wood 208) that, we might speculate in the wake of his well-publicized contretemps with Oprah Winfrey, functions to offset the disturbingly feminizing implications of his turn to domestic fiction.5 Moreover, the heterogeneity of contemporary fiction has its own analogues in the postmodern era: for the middle-class realism of Susan Choi and Jhumpa Lahiri, the books of John Updike; for the comic-book magical realism of Jonathan Lethem and Michael Chabon, the more traditional version practiced by Toni Morrison; for the picaresques of Han Ong, Jonathan Safran Froer, and Benjamin Kunkel, those of Saul Bellow.
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